cartographies

sometime over past weeks i’ve forgotten how to write when aware of audience. not because of your existence as reader but because of the necessarily confessional nature of the blog, about the truths it affirms and assumes and those it refuses to acknowledge, those it cannot. which storylines to perpetuate, and for how long, becomes a debilitating question. not a new one, of course, but ever-new.

have been criss-crossing landmasses, this month. the highway a kind of home: movement, moving, motion, in the early morning and through the afternoon and into the night, driving across the world, watching the horizon, silhouettes. i finally effected some closure, separated myself from the months that had held the semester and the other things, limped elsewhere. for the first time in weeks i made myself some coffee and sat down to drink it without keyboard or pen or book to hand. then a couple of days in southern alberta hiking hoodoos and looking at the sky, before home to build and construct, working eight hours a day under the sun. then a whirlwind trip tacking across the west coast, editing and kayaking, hiking and reading, learning various family and friends. returned, now, a few days before driving to saskatchewan, there to meet the gently rolling hills and undulating fields of wheat, weathered fences and vast sky.

prairie:

and mountains:

have realized, over the course of these drivings across three provinces, that i am at home on the prairies in ways i am not elsewhere. i’ve recognized that i could learn the island – walking twilight near tod inlet, or exploring the area around englishman’s bay last summer, realizing i could come to love that landscape, those horizons, the crash and fade of ocean into sky. the island aside, however, i’m discomfited by british columbia’s lower mainland – the mountains rising steeply carve up the horizon, they claim sections of the stratosphere; it is difficult to be alone with oneself, perhaps, as the foliage seems exercised by the desire to fill in all the empty spaces, to everywhere impose their green. the leaves push up, out, through. the skyline is too nearby, things are far more tangible, wet. the prairies – southern alberta, for instance, or through central saskatchewan – preserve an emptiness and a distance, the ability to regard self and other, the places between. the interstices between people, cities, words, sites and loci – the median-spaces are preserved and honoured.

last week dan, brent, and i went to see daniel boyarin speak at congress.

i’m taking symbolic logic and ethics (degree requirements) in summer session. am also taking faraz rabbani’s online classes on the khareedah and the mukhtar (aqidah and fiqh texts, respectively) – both of which i studied in damascus three years ago – and hope to get through salek ben siddina’s “attainment of excellence in prayer” sometime, too. reading projects for this summer include the st.paul cycle (as followup to the conference we attended last week, “what has jerusalem to do with rome? st.paul’s journeys into philosophy”) and a core of theoretical literature i’ve been perusing but haven’t actually grappled with (david scott, hent de vries, etc) as well as poetries (john ashbery, phyllis webb). other plans for this summer include building a hujrah and lean-to, working garden, backpacking at the end of july and canoeing at the beginning of august, perhaps a longer saskatchewan trip or camping at some point, and trying to build momentum so that the oncoming schoolyear, with its attendent regime of powers and disciplines and regulatory mechanisms, does not seem so nausea-inducing.

this space tends inevitably toward inventory. it’s been forty days since i last posted – an inadvertant khalwa, a silence as liturgy. musa had forty days and nights on sinai, returned with the written and oral torah. a cycling recursive logic that, in its impact on my life, reveals the poverty of our days.